Nonfiction

I Submitted my PhD Thesis!

A Life Milestone Update

Being a “student” has been part of my core identity for most of my life.

For the last four-and-a-half years, my social media bios have all proclaimed me to be a proud postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin. Before that, it said Brock University Student for five years. Soon, I’ll have to update them all again, because I’ve submitted my thesis — and won’t be a student much longer!

There’s still the matter of defending my thesis in what’s called a Viva, or an oral exam where I am asked questions about my dissertation and my area of expertise by a panel of specialists. But the writing portion of this degree is now concluded!

(Well, unless I get asked to make major revisions by my examiners. Even then, that’s mostly editing, rather than writing or rewriting.)

Turning it in was anti-climactic. I had to drag and drop a PDF of my thesis, 411 pages long, into a SharePoint folder. I then emailed eThesis to confirm they had gotten it. That was it.

Before the days of online submission, doctoral students would have to get hard copies of their thesis printed and mail or hand off the final product to their examiners. Holding the final, printed book in your hands must feel substantial: the physical product of four years’ labour.

By comparison, uploading a PDF doesn’t feel like much of a milestone. I feel a bit empty and unsure of what to do with myself. There’s no concrete evidence that I did much of anything, other than the half-eaten cake in my fridge.

(Everyone should get a celebratory cake when they submit their thesis. 10/10, highly recommend.)

Now that the writing part is over, what do I do while I wait to be examined? I’ll probably write more Medium stories. Catch up on side projects. Focus on my health, rehabilitation after my knee surgery, and all the administrative paperwork I’ve been putting off.

You know, get on with my life.

I think I should feel elated, like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Maybe I’ll feel that way after my Viva, or when I introduce myself as Doctor Lawrence for the first time. But right now? I just feel like I’m in a weird middle-ground, no longer a student but not yet “finished.”

Even if I won’t be in a “program” anymore (or be paying tuition! Halleluiah!), I think I’ll always identify as a “student.”

We never stop learning, even after we leave school. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that I’m never going to stop learning and writing and being passionate about the things I learn and write about, whether that’s in a postdoc (which is kind of still like being a student…) or another role in academia, or whether I leave academia altogether.

For anyone curious, here’s the abstract for my doctoral dissertation in English literature:

My thesis, ‘The New Womanly Man’: Cross-dressing and gender inversion in Joyce and his contemporaries, explores questions of gender identity and performance by examining depictions of cross-dressing and gender inversion in James Joyce’s Ulysses, contextualised through close-readings of other modernist texts, genetic criticism, and the historical and cultural context of the early twentieth century.

Chapter 1 compares Joyce’s depiction of cross-dressing and sex-change to those in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Looking at Orlando as a text composed independently of Ulysses, I evaluate their respective sex-change scenes, investigate their origins using genetic criticism, and discuss the importance of names and pronouns. I also consider gender ambiguity in the sex-object choice of these ‘New Womanly Men’ using Otto Weininger’s law of attraction as a framework. The key argument of this chapter is that Joyce and Woolf differently respond to the rapid scientific and social changes associated with modernism by leaning into the sexological construction of gender (Joyce) or rejecting that medicolegal prescriptivism in favour of a sociocultural definition based on clothing, language, and behaviour (Woolf).

Chapter 2 reflects on ‘modernist womb envy’ and compares Joyce’s use of a procreative metaphor to Djuna Barnes’s novels Ryder and Nightwood, moving from a metaphorical “womb of imagination” (P 217) to the organ as a site of somatic trauma. Although both Joyce and Barnes present essentialist definitions of ‘woman,’ Barnes’s “third sex” challenges the dominant narrative by making suffering, not biology, the shared burden of womanhood, especially in the case of Doctor O’Connor, whom I argue meets all the criteria of being a trans woman. The medicalisation of gender is foregrounded in my comparison of how Joyce and Barnes use sexology to transcend social barriers, but in so doing, perpetuate stereotypes based on racist pseudoscience and biologism.

Writing from the perspective of Elaine Showalter’s ‘hypothetical female reader,’ in Chapter 3, I present “Penelope” as a performance of gendered writing that imitates sexual difference by dressing heterosexual male desire in Nora Barnacle’s linguistic underpants. I argue that Joyce’s ‘female voice’ is an example of ‘sexophonologistic schizophrenesis,’ a Wakese neologism I define using Aldous Huxley’s anti-Freudian novella, “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow.” Using feminist theorists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray as theoretical models, I argue that although the episode has been read as an example of écriture féminine, “Penelope” problematises the relationship between body, mind, gender, and language through unheimlich, nonmimetic ‘authorial cross-dressing.’

Chapter 4 addresses costume and cross-dressing in Ulysses using a queer materialist lens. After contextualising fin-de-siècle Orientalism and theorising a construction of gender that racially Others the feminine, I discuss Gerty MacDowell as an idealised portrait of Western femininity in “Nausicaa” and the parallel construction of Irish masculinity in “Cyclops,” which inform Bloom’s cross-dressing and sex-change fantasies in “Circe.” Applying cultural materialism and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, I discuss these episodes’ theatricality and costumes, as well as Joyce’s sources, in order to reveal the embeddedness of gender inversion in the modernist zeitgeist. Finally, I turn to Bits of Fun, an important source for Bloom’s transformation fantasy in “Circe,” both as a genetic source and as a historical record that captures ephemeral exchanges between real queer people. The implications of this reading, as well as ethical concerns, are covered in my conclusion.

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